Locating Counterfeit FTDI chips and CH340 using udev

The original FTDI chips have the text engraved and the clones have the text printed.

FTDI used malicious windows drivers to brick the counterfeit chips (changing their Product ID to zero). The clones were quite good and the original FTDI tool can be used to revert the changes. The tool also has another open source implementation here.

Online shops couldn’t sell the arduinos and they began cheating, they blocked the FTDI chip so that windows drivers can not write to them (corrupting the eeprom). The problem lies in that they all have the same serial number now.

This tool can be used to recover the serial number (but should not be used later on windows).

print "Deliberately corrupting the checksum of your device\'s EEPROM will"
print "protect it from being bricked by the malicious FTDI Windows driver,"
print "while still functioning with said driver. However, if you do this,"
print "ALL SETTINGS WILL REVERT TO DEFAULTS AND THE DEVICE SERIAL NUMBER"
print "WILL NO LONGER BE VISIBLE.

Then my previous post can be used to locate them.

CH340 chips:

They don’t have a serial number but if they’re plugged allways in the same place other udev tricks could be used (the kernel parameter). I’ve to test it yet and then I’ll update this post.